Getting Rid of Bradley by Jennifer Crusie Read Free Book Online

wanted to sit in his lap. Now he was anxious to cut to the
    chase and get some answers before one of the other dogs began a soft shoe or tried to sell him
    magazines.
    “Sure,” Lucy said. “Whatever.”
    She was sitting next to him in a big, ugly olive-green chair that didn’t seem to go with the rest of the
    house, and she looked swallowed up by it somehow, her knees higher than her waist, her shoulders
    bowing in a little like folded angel wings.
    “Are you all right?” Zack said. “You seem... depressed.”
    “I went to court to get divorced today, and my ex-husband stood me up. Then my sister decided to
    change my Me. Then a drug dealer tried to mug me, so I beat him up, and I thought, at last, I’m doing
    something right, and then he turned out to be a cop. You.” She blinked. “I’m having a bad day. I’ll get
    over it.”
    “You didn’t beat me up. I wasn’t even trying to defend myself.”
    “Sure. Whatever.”
    Zack gave up. “Tell me about Bradley. Everything you know.”
    “Bradley?” Lucy sat back, confused. “That’s what you said on the street. Why do you want to know
    about my ex-husband?”
    “If he’s the man we’re looking for, he embezzled a million and a half in government bonds from the bank
    where he worked.”
    Lucy’s mouth dropped open and she sat up straight. “He embezzled from his bank?”
    “Banks are the best places to embezzle from,” Zack said. “They usually have the most money. Now,
    when and where did you meet him?”
    Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    “He picked me up at the library,” Lucy said, still dazed from his announcement. “I was working on some
    lesson plans, and I looked up, and there he was, and he asked if he could sit down, and he talked to me
    and bought me a juice from the vending machines, and then he walked me to my car, and two months
    later we were married.”
    “That fast?” Zack said, writing everything down.
    “Well, I had my reasons.” Lucy sank back in her chair and closed her eyes. “They were the wrong
    reasons, but I didn’t know that then.”
    Zack wasn’t listening. This could be it. The dates matched. He looked over at Lucy, sitting lost in an ugly
    green chair, and he felt a sudden protectiveness for her that was totally out of character for him. The poor
    helpless kid was just an innocent bystander. That rat Bradley...
    Bradley.
    Zack started to tap his notebook again. “And exactly when did you meet him?”
    “And besides,” Lucy went on, still lost in her own train of thought, “there was the second law of
    thermonuclear dynamics.”
    “I’m sure there was. When did you meet him?”
    Lucy came back to earth. “Sorry. We got married June first. We met in the middle of March.”
    “And you got divorced in February.” Zack looked up from his notebook. “Any particular reason? Did
    he begin acting suspiciously? Did you find more money in your checking account than you could account
    for? Any...”
    “It was the blonde,” Lucy said.
    “Oh.” Zack winced for her. “Another woman? Sorry.”
    “Girl, really. Very young. Maybe twenty.”
    “That could be his wife,” Zack said.
    “His wife?” Lucy said faintly.
    “Uh, yeah. Sorry to drop it on you like that. He was married.”
    “Oh,” Lucy said.
    “Bianca Bradley. Also blonde and young, twenty-four. He must have a thing for blondes.” Zack looked
    at Lucy’s impossible black hair and looked back as his notebook. “So...”
    “That’s funny,” Lucy said. “Her maiden name was the same as his Christian name.”
    “No, her maiden name is Bergman. She...”
    Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    “Where did the Bradley come from?”
    “What Bradley?” Zack said.
    “Her last name.”
    “When she married John Bradley,” Zack said, his patience wearing thin. “The same John Bradley you
    married.”
    “I didn’t marry John Bradley.” Lucy sat up straight.